While waiting for Streamyx’s arrival to my home, I’ve been logging on to the Internet occassionally using TMNet’s 1315 dialup service. Man, it’s a hellish experience! At 33.6kbps everything takes ages to load and I’m merely visiting web sites!

I tried to visit some friends’ blogs and just couldn’t believe how bloody long it took to render the pages! After a while, I started to wonder how long would HTNet take to load on dial-up connection and I took a peek. I’m glad to find out that it loads pretty quickly.

Optimizing your web site’s loading time isn’t difficult; it’s mostly an excercise of common sense; smaller pages load faster. Hence, we should make our pages as small as possible without sacrificing the information we want to present on them.

When it comes to load time, images are undeniably the biggest culprit. However, in this multimedia age, using images is an almost unavoidable excercise. The key to using images efficiently is to select the right image for a particular purpose.